The HCM City National University's Integrated Circuit Design Research and Education Centre announced it has succeeded in fabricating Viet Nam's first 32-bit integrated circuit.

Le Quang Minh, deputy director of the university, said chip VN1632 marked important progress for the country's IC design and research sector.

It is the culmination of a 30-month Ministry of Science and Technology project titled "Researching, Developing Design and Creating RISC Chip".

The chip uses IBM 0.13um CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) technology with RISC (Reduced instruction set computing) Harvard Architecture.

It will meet the needs of high-speed and complex tasks like data encoding and decoding and photo processing and communication devices like mobile phones.

Ngo Duc Hoang, director of ICDREC and head of the project, said the centre and Viet Ban Do (Vietmap) Company are co-operating to produce 20,000 chips by 2011 for use in cars.

Nghiem Xuan Minh, head of the ministry's Natural Science and Society Department, said ICDREC would continue to produce high-technology chips especially for using in defence and security.

During the process of creating VN1632, the centre deeply understood 32-bit chip design and had trained a group of professionals along the way.

In 2008 ICDREC created the country's first 8-bit chip./.